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I have an old Dell latitude. 680K RAM. Windows had grown terribly weary so I took a Linux Mint disk and installed it on the whole drive. Interesting getting into this environment; all new to me.I've noticed recently that response time is bad. I just returned after being away from the machine 1/2 hour to find the HDD light on solid. I called up Task Manager and it showed 100% CPU even though the tasks listed only totaled about 20%. (I have the list sorted by task % so I can easily see the total, and the names of tasks running.)Why would my CPU be totally busy? I thought only Windows computers did this. . Also, I periodically get an Unresponsive Script warning. Really sounds like SPYware going to work on me. I've been told not to worry about viruses or spyware in Linux, though.

If you don't have time to do it right,where will you find time to do it over?

Nope not spyware more likely don't have the proper video driver for it. Causing 3d rendering to be emulated in software and maxing out the CPU in the process. Also 680K RAM is not sufficient for Linux Mint 14. Which you didn't specify version used.

Due also low ram causes the OS to write and read a lot more from the swap file on the hardrive.

So give more specs of machine CPU,Video chipset used and ram shows that a lighter distro may be needed. Like Mint xfce version or others that members here may suggest.

Orbmiser wrote:Nope not spyware more likely don't have the proper video driver for it. Causing 3d rendering to be emulated in software and maxing out the CPU in the process. Also 680K RAM is not sufficient for Linux Mint 14. Which you didn't specify version used.

Due also low ram causes the OS to write and read a lot more from the swap file on the hardrive.

So give more specs of machine CPU,Video chipset used and ram shows that a lighter distro may be needed. Like Mint xfce version or others that members here may suggest.

Using Linux Mint 12 LXDE

If you don't have time to do it right,where will you find time to do it over?

seems to me the problem with using TOP or Task Manager for viewing what's happening when the processor is being hogged down 100%is that you can't get to them, or run them, when the processor is being hogged down 100%.

CATCH-22, if you recall that movie.......

If you don't have time to do it right,where will you find time to do it over?

No, top should also get some CPU time even if other processes already use 100%. Looks like your firefox is very busy, and also making the X server (Xorg) busy. It's also grown rather huge. It's already used a few days of CPU, my first instinct would be to restart it.

Here's my observation: if I click on a link, usually it will take about 10 minutes of solid HDD time, in which time I can do nothing.Then the light will sputter a bit, and quit.Then I usually get a Script error message, or two.This morning I got these two, after such delays:Stop Script or Continue?https//fbstatic.a-akamaihd.net/rsrc.php/vz/y2/r/v5ststrDzxK.js:29and chrome/browser/content URLbarbindings.xml:181I'm not even USING Chrome, just FFox

just had the identical problem right in the middle of typing this message; first the long pause, then both of the script error messages.

If you don't have time to do it right,where will you find time to do it over?

okay it looks like those scripts are the culprits. They come up each time I get this extended HDD action.

I now rebooted from the original Linux Mint disk. I've gone repeatedly from Facebook to Yahoo mail to GOOGLE search and I have NO TROUBLE. Except of course it's a bit slow compared to a good installation.

So, what are these two Scripts about? Are they like malware, that I shouldn't have them? Or are they necessities that are somehow corrupted?

I could reinstall from CD since I have not done much since installation.

But how do I avoid , or fix this in the future?

If you don't have time to do it right,where will you find time to do it over?

When I said "restart it" I meant firefox. It had grown to above the size of your memory so parts of the memory was being swapped to disk, and when it needs that memory for something it would start swapping. With my previous desktop this could happen if I opened a page with too many or too large images; the disk would start churning like mad and everything would freeze for several minutes . It's a good idea to restart firefox if you're running low on free memory, it tends to keep growing.

As for those scripts, not to worry. When your system starts thrashing (as it's called), thinks take too long and firefox thinks it's hanging.

bjornmu wrote:When I said "restart it" I meant firefox. It had grown to above the size of your memory so parts of the memory was being swapped to disk, and when it needs that memory for something it would start swapping. With my previous desktop this could happen if I opened a page with too many or too large images; the disk would start churning like mad and everything would freeze for several minutes . It's a good idea to restart firefox if you're running low on free memory, it tends to keep growing.As for those scripts, not to worry. When your system starts thrashing (as it's called), thinks take too long and firefox thinks it's hanging.

I tend to disagree here, mainly because I start up fresh in the morning and get into Ymail and, like this morning, immediately get these problems. No way to be less overloaded by restarting again...... But yes, I am now running from CD and have a Youtube video playing without fault, a Ymail tab, a Facebook tab, a GOOGLE tab, and sometimes many more windows open, and everything is going fine; I think Firefox is doing an incredible job.

I do sometimes notice that it's time to close a few tabs when they're just sitting there wasting memory, but that's no big deal. The super-long pauses and diskthrashing and Script Messages, those are a big deal.

If you don't have time to do it right,where will you find time to do it over?

Well, your top output says firefox had grown to 1100 megs virtual memory size, I don't know how that's even possible since it's more than physical memory + used swap, but anyway it's quite significant. It's also using 67% of your available physical memory so I'd say it looks pretty guilty.

bjornmu wrote:Well, your top output says firefox had grown to 1100 megs virtual memory size, I don't know how that's even possible since it's more than physical memory + used swap, but anyway it's quite significant. It's also using 67% of your available physical memory so I'd say it looks pretty guilty.

As I said, FFox is incredible. I'll reboot into my installed Mint start FFOX , open only Ymail, and do another TOP. That should confirm the "small" size of FFox.

But my main problem still exists: disk thrashing and error script messages.

If you don't have time to do it right,where will you find time to do it over?

Already 472m virtual memory and 4 minutes of CPU does look a bit excessive, could it be something on Ymail which causes it to run out of control? You may want to keep and eye and see if it just keeps growing and growing.

if FF in live-session was ok and is misbehaving in the installed system there's something wrong either on the profile or with some(s) addons start FF in safe mode (first quit all instances of FF) then in the terminal